Expertise
Research areas include molecular systematics of scleractinian corals and molecular analysis of coral disease. Research interests and specialties are corals, coral reefs, marine invertibrates, molecular systematics, biodiversity, conservation biology, and pre-health profession advising.Biography
Dr. Sandra L. Romano, who joined the faculty at UVI in 2000 as a professor of marine biology, has worked with undergraduate and graduate students on her research on the molecular systematics of corals, for which she receivedfundingfromthe National Science Foundation.
She has served as the Pre-Health Professions Advisor, the coordinator for the National Institutes of Health's Minority Biomedical Research Support – Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement (NIH MBRS-RISE)program on the St. Thomas Campus. She has also served as the director of the Masters in Marine and Environmental Science Program and chair of the Departmentof Biological Sciences. She currently leads the Workforce Development and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education research portion of the Virgin Islands Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research(VI - EPSCoR) project. She also provides leadership for the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Partnership for International Research and Education, a collaborative grant project that UVI has with the University of South Florida.
Dr. Romano's interest in marine biology and coral reefs developed during her teenage years on St. Croix where she graduated from The Good Hope School and then later attended the West Indies Lab. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Aquatic Biology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and went on to earn her masters and Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Hawaii, Manoa. She was awarded a yearlong postdoctoral fellowship by the Smithsonian Institution at the National Museum of Natural History and the Laboratory for Molecular Systematics. She spent another four years as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Guam Marine Laboratory.
In 2012, Dr. Romano was selected as one of forty national Partnership for Undergraduate Life Science Education (PULSE)Leadership Fellows. PULSEis a collaborative effort developed and funded by NSF, NIH/National Institute of General Medical Sciences, and Howard Hughes Medical Institutewhose objective is to implement recommendations of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Vision and Change Reportfor transforming life sciences educationat the Department level and above.
Abstract of Research
My general interests are in the evolution of biodiversity in marine organisms, particularly
those that make up the coral reef community. My research focuses on using molecular
tools to understand the evolution and population genetics of scleractinian corals,
the animals that form the framework of coral reefs. I use molecular characters to
test morphological hypotheses about higher level relationships (between genera and
families) within the order Scleractinia. Most recently, in collaboration with colleagues,
I have started using molecular characters to better understand the dynamics of coral
disease.
Selected Publications:
